Michael Novins

I visited El Calafate in December 2021, where it was easy to arrange a day trip to Los Glaciares National Park. The trips seem to follow a similar itinerary -- …

I visited Socotra in November 2021. At the time of my visit, Air Arabia provided Monday-only charter flights between Abu Dhabi and Socotra, so visitors were required to spend a …

In February 2020, I made my second visit to the small cloud forest reserves, about two hours northwest of Mexico City, where each year hundreds of millions of monarch butterflies …

While returning from Mole National Park to Tamale, I stopped briefly in Larabanga in northern Ghana to visit its whitewashed mud-plaster and wooden-beam mosque, which will celebrate its six hundredth …

I organized my December 2019 trip to Sudan with ITC Sudan and stayed at their Nubian Rest Camp near the foot of Jebel Barkal and Meroe Camp overlooking the pyramid …

I organized my December 2019 trip to Sudan with ITC Sudan and stayed at their Nubian Rest Camp near the foot of Jebel Barkal and Meroe Camp overlooking the pyramid …

In November 2019, I made the eight-hour bus ride from Lima to Nasca on a Wednesday, spent 30 minutes flying over the lines on Thursday morning, and made the eight-hour …

I visited Mauritania in October 2019. I flew into Nouakchott (very easy to obtain visa on arrival), where I visited the camel market and Port de Peche, the city's fishing …

In September 2019, I flew from Bujumbura to Kigoma on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in western Tanzania. My first stop was the Livingstone Memorial in Ujiji, which marks the …

In September 2019, I took a bus from Kigali to Gisenyi on Lake Kivu, where I spent the night at the Lake Kivu Serena Hotel, and in the morning crossed …

In September 2019, I visited the tentative site with the least likely chance of being elevated to the list of World Heritage Sites. While driving around central Burundi, we made …

In September 2019, I apparently commissioned Burundi's most famous drum site, the Gishora Drum Sanctuary, for an hourlong performance for an audience consisting of me and dozens of local children …

In September 2019, I hired a small boat to cruise along the Rusizi River, which flows through Rusizi National Park in Burundi. I went looking for Gustave, a large Nile …

In July 2019, I made the nearly 200 km and three hour day trip from Kazan to Bolgar, on the shores of the Volga River. The day before my trip, …

In December 2018, I visited the Omo Valley in far southwestern Ethiopia, including the Hamar people (known for their bull-jumping ceremonies and where the women curl and color their hair …

In November 2018, I visited Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, which as its name might reveal was established in the eighteenth century as a settlement for freed slaves. By …

In November 2018, I spent two days at Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary on the outskirts of Freetown, which works to rescue and rehabilitate chimpanzees orphaned by the illegal pet trade or …

In October 2018, I made a day trip from Aswan to visit Abu Simbel, two massive rock temples in Nubia, near Egypt’s southern border with Sudan. The twin temples were …

In October 2018, I made a day trip from Amman to Jerash, one of the largest and most well preserved Roman ruins outside Rome, and the second most inexcusable omission …

I made my second trip to Jordan in October 2018. From the middle of the seventh century until the middle of the eighth, the Umayyad dynasty built several desert castles …